Who Is Stuart Beattie?

Roger and I saw the film "Collateral" last night. Excellent, excellent film. Tom Cruise is awesome, Jamie Foxx is awesome, and the rest of the cast stellar as well (including Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, and Jada Pinkett Smith). I really liked how patient Michael Mann was with the introduction and the scenes between the five stops. LA never looked so beautiful. The movie has the same operatic qualities as Mann's earlier LA film, "Heat," but with a more intimate cast, a more intimate world, and therefore maybe a more resonant film--to me. I loved "Heat" for its ambitious scale and its bloated cast and storylines. To put it in literary terms, "Heat" was like Edna Ferber, and "Collateral" was like Alice Munro. Write me and I'll explain more.

The author behind this beauty is Stuart Beattie. Although Mann may or may not have done a lot of shaping. Who is Stuart Beattie? Imdb.com doesn't offer much in the way of biography. It mentions that he wrote the screen story of "Pirates of the Caribbean"--another script I really liked. After some research, we find that Mr. Beattie is working on the new script for Indiana Jones 4. Yay! FYI, this new Indy movie apparently has seen many of the hottest writers today competing to submit the winning screenplay, including Tom Stoppard(!) and M. Night Shyamalan. Read about the rumors and fistfights here. And more Indy fun here. Also, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Kate Capshaw, and Karen Allen (go Marion!) are supposed to have parts in the fourth film.